How To Politely Tell Someone They’re Wearing Too Much Perfume

We’ve all been in situations where you’re pressed up in close vicinty against someone. A movie theater. The subway. The elevator. And from a distance, the person looks fine. They look so normal. And then you sit down next to them and you realize that it’s as though perfume bomb has exploded directly inside your nostrils.

For a long time now we’ve just been grabbing our throats, pretending to choke, allowing ourselves to fall limply to the ground hoping they get the message that their perfume is like poison, but we’re trying to be adults lately, and we can’t drop and roll the way we used to. So we asked the lovely Hannah Holman – the face of Marc Jacob’s Daisy Eau So Fresh perfume – for advice. She claims:

“I gave this to someone and she loved it, and she was putting it on and said she was almost out. And I said “that’s because you just sprayed on ten sprays.” And she said “yeah, I really like it!” So I kind of said, “you know, when you’re standing by people, you don’t want it to be too powerful! You want it to make people curious, you want them to be like ‘oh, what’s that nice smell?’ instead of, ‘I can smell that across the room.” If you have to tell someone, say it to them like you’re advising them! Or make up a story. Like, ‘Someone told me that your perfume is a little much.’”

Okay, so from now on the story you can make up is “I saw two girls clutching their throats, falling to the ground, gasping out some Wilfred Owen lines. Maybe ease up on the perfume?”

I was at the pool this morning and kept gagging from the cologne on the guy in the lane next to me. IN THE POOL. If people can smell your cologne when you’ve been swimming for the last 30 minutes in a giant chlorine-saturated body of water, IT’S TOO STRONG.